“I saw new heavens and a new earth”
When someone you love dies suddenly,
the world seems so empty. Work, supper,
errands, bills, plans - everything seems so irrelevant. Your mind and heart are elsewhere. The landscape as you drive to work now looks
strange; like the receding panorama you see from the rear platform of a moving
train, a panorama rapidly being taken over by the past tense. It’s a world that you feel you have somehow
left behind – of little interest anymore.
I wouldn’t call it simply a state of
depression. There is something positive
or curious about it. I think you begin
to feel distant from your everyday surroundings because the death of the one
you love has made you suddenly more conscious of other dimensions you were till
then too preoccupied to notice. It’s
like a wake up call. Caught up in this merely three dimensional world; caught
up in the daily melodrama of the workplace, in the ever changing, never
changing politics of “current events”; performing the several roles of breadwinner
or housewife or entrepreneur or bureaucrat or “life of the party”; reciting the
lines expected of us - it’s no wonder we assume that this theatre of our own
preoccupations is the only world there is.
And then someone like my young son
suddenly departs (4/28/93) and you experience grief yes, but also what the poet
Rainer Maria Rilke describes in a poem called “Death Experienced”. “The world is full of roles we act,” he says:
But when you went, a
streak of reality
broke in upon this stage
through that fissure
where you left: green of
real green,
real sunshine, real
forest.
We go on acting. Fearful and reciting
things difficult to
learn and now and then
raising gestures; but
your existence,
withdrawn from us and
taken from our play,
Can sometimes come over
us, like a knowledge
of that reality settling
in,
so that for a while we
act life
transported, not
thinking of applause.
No - that initial sense of emptiness
or distraction we feel when someone we love suddenly departs this life cannot
be simply called depression. It can be
the commencement of an awareness of a realm so real, so wonderful, so durable
that it leaves us – as it were - standing upon our every day stage immersed in
the descending light, colors, pattern
and theology of the rose window of some grand cathedral.
I am so grateful to a dear friend for giving me this poem
– unwittingly - on the second anniversary of the very hour I received a call
that my son was dead.
